


The Stranger

by psyche_girl



Series: I Need a Hero [2]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Hannibal (TV) Red Dragon Arc, Ramsay is His Own Warning, Righteous murder, Someone rescues Sansa Stark, Turns out Will Graham is too
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 18:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16392482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psyche_girl/pseuds/psyche_girl
Summary: Sansa's savior is bloody-mouthed and otherworldly and terrifying and, just maybe, as broken as she is.





	The Stranger

The stranger appeared in the middle of the hall during dinner, in a flash of white light.

 “…Hannibal?”

His hair was short, dark, and curled, and his eyes were grey, though otherwise he did not look a Northman. He was wearing strange clothing – filthy, dripping seawater and stained with blood, of a style so foreign Sansa had never seen its like before. But the most striking thing about him by far was his face, which was cross-hatched and half-twisted into grimacing by a set of livid red wounds.

The wounds were still bleeding.

“Where did you come from?” Ramsay was one of the last to react, but his voice rang out among the guards’ and servants’ and silenced them all as effectively as a knife. “Who are you? How did you get into Winterfell?”

“No,” the man said slowly, still staring at Ramsay – still staring _through_ Ramsay, as if watching something on the wall behind him. “No, you’re not Hannibal, are you.”

Ramsay, meanwhile, was smiling; the kind of smile that meant he knew he was going to get to hurt somebody soon. “No. I am not a Hannibal. I am Lord Ramsay Bolton of Winterfell. And you are going to explain who you are and what you’re doing here.”

“Where’s Hannibal?”

Ramsay smiled, and Sansa dug her nails into her palms, deep, so she didn’t flinch.

“I would show a little more respect if I were you. Bolton dungeons contain worse horrors than you can imagine.”

The stranger laughed, full-throated and genuine. It was a happy sound, and the way it rang unnatural off Winterfell’s walls sent chills running right down Sansa’s spine.

“Sorry,” he gasped, as the laughter was trailing off into giggles, “sorry, just- ‘worse than I can imagine’ - you have no idea how funny that is. Really,” he lectured – _lectured_ Ramsay, still with that absent, eerie stare. “You’re a very boring kind of monster.”

He meandered a half-step away, then back toward them, dragging an idle finger over the table as he went, the knives on it chiming, _clink clink clink_ against the wood. The motion made Sansa’s skin crawl. Something in the way he walked... He was suddenly moving like Ramsay. His face was set in an odd, eerie smile, almost _exactly_ like Ramsay’s-

“Daddy issues? Yes, obviously. And sadism, and psychopathy. But really you just like attention, don’t you? You like being the big man. The…lord? Yes, lord. Lord of Winterfell, ruler over everyone here. Lord Bolton, not a bastard...”

He trailed off, staring into the middle distance, then blinked and shook himself, and went blank again – so blank, Sansa only now realized just how blank the stranger’s face really was, and how much less frightening she found the blankness, now that the eerie Ramsaylike _glee_ was gone.

“Like I said. Boring. You could at least be creative.” He cast a scornful look down the silk-covered table. “Everyone knows what you do in the dungeons, so don’t _do_ it in the dungeons. Do it at the table, while you’ve got all your possessions standing around and calling you Lord. Eat their corpses. Make them eat each others’ corpses. Make leather, maybe, since you want to walk in your father’s skin so much. Make art, or food, or _something_.”

 _Eat_ them…Sansa could feel bile rising in her throat. It was unthinkable for anyone to be more frightening than Ramsay, Ramsay was…Ramsay was _Ramsay_ , but she had for the first time a completely unfamiliar suspicion that Ramsay might not, perhaps, for once, be the biggest threat in the room.

The man had stopped dangerously close, within Ramsay’s reach, and Sansa realized that the same moment as everyone else, when Ramsay reached out and went for him.

The man laughed, strange high giggles choking out around the hands dragging him by the wrist and neck across the table. He looked totally happy, totally peaceful, even as one of the servants screamed and Ramsay’s knife bit into his flailing arm. He looked _insane_.

“I see you,” he whispered, grinning, and bit Ramsay’s throat out with his teeth.

 

 

Only one incredibly stupid guard went for the man, after. It took about six seconds before the guard was on the floor dead, too, stabbed through the eye with a butter knife, and Sansa was most surprised by the fact that the stranger didn’t bother to pick up the dead guard’s sword. He moved like his whole body was a weapon. He didn’t bother fighting the second or the third guards; just _snarled_ at them, bits of Ramsay’s flesh sticking from his mouth, and everyone backed off.

“Sorry for the mess,” he told Sansa absently, stepping away from the…from what used to be Ramsay, to let the first guard’s corpse fall to the floor.

“He was going to feed me to his dogs,” Sansa managed, after a long few minutes of staring at anything _but_ the mess.

“Dogs?” Oh Gods, now he was _looking_ at her.

“I- yes.”

The strange man smiled. It would have been a normal person’s smile, except for the blood in his teeth. “I like dogs.”

Sansa took him to the kennels.

 

 

Sansa entertained half-formed plans, on the long walk down to the kennels, of simply leaving the man and the dogs to each other, but the kennelmaster’s daughter stopped those plans in their tracks by turning up in the doorway. She didn’t interfere – she seemed as scared of the strange man as Sansa was, for a wonder – but her place at the door meant she was now at Sansa’s _back_ , and Sansa was, just barely, more frightened of being left alone with the kennelmaster’s daughter and all Ramsay’s men than she was of being left with the stranger.

At least the stranger didn’t seem interested in Sansa. When the dogs started barking, he plopped down in front of the slavering din and _stared_.

 “S-so,” Sansa managed, a good five minutes later, when she finally gathered up the courage to speak. “How- how _did_ you get to Winterfell, my lord?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He was crouched on the messy kennel floor in front of the dog cages, watching them snarl and nip at each other with every sign of absorption. “I’m pretty sure I’ve finally gone insane and am hallucinating all this, actually. That, or I’m in a coma, and this is some kind of deathbed vision. Do you have any meat?”

The kennelmaster’s daughter jumped when she realized he was speaking to her.

“N-no. They eat,” she swallowed, clearly remembering the scene in the dining hall. “They eat… corpses, mostly, m’lord. And some live…they eat what they hunt.”

“Ah.” The ruined cheek twisted. “Of course they do.” He spun up from his crouch to face them and pinned the kennelmaster’s daughter with his stare. “Go and get some pork, then. Or, if that’s not possible, chicken will do. I want twice whatever their usual rations are.” The kennelmaster’s daughter hesitated – frozen by the stranger’s stare, or by fear, Sansa couldn’t say – and he demanded “ _Go_ ,” and she went.

Sansa didn’t realize until the woman was gone that she had been holding her breath.

“She’s a masochist, you know,” the man told her, casually.

Sansa jumped. “What?”

“That woman. You’re afraid of her. You don’t need to be. She’s a sadomasochist with a specific fixation, and you don’t fit her profile. She was interested in Ramsay, that’s the only reason she hurt you. She’s more frightened of me than you are of her right now.” He blinked, and the otherworldly cast seemed to fall from his eyes like smoke. “So you don’t need to be scared.”

It was…strange to think of the kennelmaster’s daughter as another of Ramsay’s victims. Sansa decided quickly that even if she _had_ been afraid, it didn’t excuse what that woman had done to Theon. Or to Sansa. But the fear was information she could use, if it were true.

Also, she wasn’t sure, but she thought the stranger might have just offered to protect her.

“I- thank you, my lord,” she said, in case he had.

“Will.”

“What?”

“My name’s Will Graham.”

Another Sansa, many years ago, would have responded to that with her own name and a gracious curtsy. _This_ Sansa was not sure she wanted Will Graham, who liked dogs and spoke of hallucinations and had torn Ramsay’s throat out with his teeth, to know just yet that she was Lady Sansa of Winterfell, and kept her mouth shut.

She… _was_ Lady of Winterfell now, wasn’t she? She was a Stark by blood, and she had been Ramsay’s wife, and now Ramsay was dead.

Ramsay was dead. Will Graham killed Ramsay. To the victor go the spoils, and she was Ramsay’s wife.

Sansa sat with that thought for a long, long time.

 

 

When the kennelmaster’s daughter came back with meat – and with Hwyll, one of the stablehands, to carry it – Sansa noticed her normally ruddy face was white, and her eyes kept twitching away from where Graham stood. She dropped the bones, and she and Hwyll left quickly.

Graham was left to toss the food into the hounds’ cage alone. The din was enormous. Sansa felt her gorge rise again, seeing the dogs’ teeth tear at the flesh – remembering Graham’s teeth tearing, biting – remembering _Ramsay_ -

“Hey,” Graham’s voice was coming from somewhere very close, although Sansa couldn’t see him. Her whole field of vision had gone red. “Hey, are you okay? You’re – um, I don’t actually know your name, but you’re in Winterfell. It’s- I don’t know the date either. Er. It’s daytime. You’re in Winterfell’s kennels. You’re safe. It’s daylight. You’re in Winterfell…”

He repeated the mantra until Sansa stopped shaking. The word _kennels_ nearly restarted her panic, but _Winterfell_ made her calm, helped her feel the way air wasn’t coming into her lungs, and start breathing it again.

“That’s better,” Graham said, when she managed a shaky breath. “Is- um. Is it okay if I touch you? Or would- oh, _ow_ , okay, I will definitely not touch you. I will stay over here.”

He did, too. He stayed all the way on the other side of the room, sitting tucked small in a corner and looking away from her, until Sansa felt stable enough to look back.

“You don’t fit.”

His voice made her jump. “S-sorry, my lord?”

“You don’t fit. All of this,” he waved an airy hand around, “the fantasy setting, the filth and grime, the cannibal dogs, I could buy it as a dream or a hallucination, it’s no weirder than ravenstags. Even the boringly predictable psychopaths – God knows I’ve got enough of the interesting ones in my head. And of course I’d kill people, in a hallucination. But I don’t hallucinate scared teenage girls.” He shifted a little, glancing at the wall beside her. “Maybe you’re meant to be Abigail.”

“Who’s Abigail?”

He didn’t answer.

“You’re- I know this won’t mean much, my lord, but you are not dreaming.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say ‘you are not mad’. “You are in Winterfell, in the North, in Westeros. It is daytime.”

His ruined mouth twisted at her repetition of his words, in something she thought might have been meant as a smile.

“Guess I’m not in Kansas anymore.”

“Is Kansas your homeland?”

“Sure.” He huffed something that might have been a laugh. “Let’s call it that.”

“You mentioned deathbed visions. Were you in a battle?”

He gave another strange half-laugh. It sounded more honest than the mad giggling he’d done earlier over Ramsay’s corpse. “I killed a dragon last night.”

He said the words as if they were a joke. Sansa was not at all sure whether to believe him.

“You must be a mighty warrior, then, my lord,” she said, because it never hurt to flatter men.

“My…Hannibal and I were fighting him. He died, and I took Hannibal with me over the cliff. I didn’t expect to live through it. I must be on the _really_ good drugs, if this and you and Winterfell is what I’m dreaming up.”

“You are not dreaming, my lord. You are real.” She swallowed hard, because he’d said thinking he wasn’t real was part of what made him kill Ramsay. “ _I_ am real.”

“Why do you keep calling me my lord?”

“I – are you not a lord?” His clothes were filthy, true, but even through the strangeness she could tell they were of fine make, and his speech cultured despite the foreign accent. He was well-fed, too, which in these days might mean a lord or might just mean a Southerner. More than that, though, he moved like…

Not like a lord, Sansa thought, trying to look at him with Petyr-trained eyes. Not like somebody used to command, but not like a commoner either. Like someone who didn’t fit. Outside the system.

“People aren’t lords, in the real world,” he told her gently. Possibly, he meant the gentleness to be reassuring; as he was referring to somewhere else as the ‘real’ world, Sansa was not reassured. “Well. I mean, Hannibal’s a Count, but... come to think of it, this is more his type of hallucination than mine. Swords and stones and shitty monsters and damsels to terrorize and castles to conquer. He’d _love_ this.”

“Was Hannibal your lord, then?”

“No! No, he was _not_ , he…” He trailed off, glanced at her sideways, and then his expression went hazy. “We betrayed each other and loved each other and hated each other, and he saved my life and he taught me how to kill and who I am.” He blinked, and the shadows fell from his eyes – the same shadows, Sansa realized, that he’d worn when he spoke the innermost thoughts of Ramsay, of the kennelmaster’s daughter.

Perhaps this stranger really _was_ magic. Sansa shivered.

“He’s dead, now. Or, I think he’s dead. My memory stops before we hit the water.”

“A cliff,” Sansa prompted. “You threw him off it.”

He was giving her a long look. “You don’t mind, do you? That I’ve killed.”

He was _very_ much not a lord. He was most like her half-brother Jon, or Shae, Sansa decided – someone who had moved among lords, but never had a lord’s training. He didn’t seem to know how to talk to her. He didn’t seem to know how to talk to _people_.

Which was a comfort, because so far all she knew about him was that he could kill Ramsay and see into men’s minds (and that he was unlikely to live long once Lord Bolton returned). Talking to _people_ was the first skill she’d come across that she had, and he didn’t. It was a way she could make herself useful to him, other than...

No. _No_. She wouldn’t think of that.

He hadn’t touched her. He’d stayed very far away, when she’d been scared. He wasn’t Ramsay.

“All men kill,” she tried, when she realized he was waiting for an answer. She thought of the Hound, who’d had a ruined face too.

Will Graham sighed, and thunked his head back against the wall.

“This really _is_ a Hannibal kind of hallucination.”

He thrust one arm through the bars of the cage, beckoning with the hand covered in their masters’ blood. To Sansa’s shock, the hounds didn’t bite – instead, they crept forward and licked at him.

**Author's Note:**

> I have watched as little of Ramsay's screentime as I can get away with, so apologies if he seems OOC. I also haven't seen S3 of Hannibal, so Will's personality in this is largely my extrapolation from fandom. I welcome feedback!


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